Kyle Stephens
Founder, Craft Beverage Warehouse LLC

 Like most great businesses, the idea for Craft Beverage Warehouse LLC was created to address a gap in the market.  After working in the craft beverage industry for years, founder Kyle Stephens saw the opportunity to provide affordable, moderate quantities of packaging materials for small to medium-sized craft breweries.

Instead of solving the problem for his employer, Kyle collaborated with Michael—who has experience in finance, business scaling, and creative digital marketing, procurement and relationship-building—and Craft Beverage Warehouse (CBW) was born in Brew City.  

Craft Beverage Warehouse sells brand-agnostic wholesale beverage packaging materials in a small-quantity format at an affordable price while utilizing an easy-to-use online ordering platform.

Located in Milwaukee’s Century City Business Park, once home to automotive giants A.O. Smith and Tower Automotive, CBW is committed to growing its business in this former manufacturing powerhouse which lost many of its jobs to outsourcing in the mid-1990s.

NWSCDC was able to provide a working capital line of credit for CBW at the time of startup, which helped the company scale purchasing early on. Due to the newness of the business, many vendors asked for upfront cash payment with purchase orders, sometimes up to 10-weeks in advance of delivery. Without the line of credit provided by NWSCDC, CBW would have had to either raise more equity from outside investors or slow our growth.

 Kyle and his business are just getting started.  In the next five years, he hopes CBW will expand their sales pipeline to the Midwest and beyond, which will only bring more jobs to Milwaukee. As the business grows, they will also explore innovations in beverage packaging which will provide additional manufacturing and warehousing opportunities in a city built on the love of great beer.